Alan Watt

Alan Watt grew up on a strawberry farm in Guelph, Ontario Canada. He became a standup comic in the 1980s and moved to Los Angeles on Jan. 1st '94, just 17 days before the big earthquake. After selling his first novel for an obscene amount of money he quit the road, stayed home and got a girlfriend.

Watt (call him Al) is an L.A. Times best-selling novelist and screenwriter as well as consultant to some of Hollywood's top writers and producers. He has won a number of awards for his writing including France's 2004 Prix Printemps (best foreign novel) for Diamond Dogs.

Mr. Watt first taught a summer screenwriting workshop at UCLA in 1998, and has been teaching and lecturing on the creative process in L.A. and at colleges around the country ever since. He spent three years teaching storytelling to inner city high school students through the non-profit arm of Spoken Interludes.

He founded L.A. Writers' Lab in 2002 as a place for writers to deepen their craft by learning to marry the wildness of their imaginations to the rigor of story structure. He has taught everyone from award-winning authors and A-list screenwriters, to journalists, poets, actors, professional athletes, war veterans, housewives, doctors, lawyers, television showrunners, and anyone else with a story to tell.

In 2010 he created The 90-Day Novel Press to publish books on writing, which includes Amazon's #1 bestselling book on writing, The 90-Day Novel. Mr. Watt is also the founder of Writers Tribe Books, a publisher of literary fiction. And you may, perhaps, recognize him from his three lines as the hotdog vendor in the "Chinese Gum" episode of Seinfeld.

BECOMING A PROFESSIONAL WRITER
The publishing industry has undergone tremendous changes over the past five years. “Mid-list” writers who relied on decent advances from their publishers have found themselves shut out of the big publishing houses — not through lack of talent, but because they have yet to write a blockbuster. This has led to confusion and disillusionment among many authors who fail to see this as an opportunity.
The bottom line is that as writers our goal is to

Beginning Wednesday, March 18th
WHEN: Workshop meets third Wednesday of each month – 12:00-2:00pm (PST) Weekly check-ins are Mondays from 9:05-9:30am (PST) WHERE: Your telephone
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” - Aristotle
THE PROFESSIONAL PROGRAM is an ongoing teleconference workshop for novelists and memoirists that you can join at any time. We are a group of dedicated writers who share the common goal of

The 90-Day Novel Tele-Course Early Registration Pricing The 90-Day Novel is an intensive teleconference workshop designed to guide the writer from initial idea to the completion of a first draft. This program is available for both fiction writers and memoirists, and is offered to writers at all levels.
When: Mondays 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. and Fridays 12:00 p.m. to 12:50 p.m. (PST) (Check WORKSHOP SCHEDULE for dates) Where: Your telephone Instructor: Alan Watt THE HEMINGWAY

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
Everyone has a story. It takes courage to tell it, be it memoir or fiction, because there comes a point where we must separate the facts from the truth. The challenge for the storyteller lies in distilling events to their essential meaning. When we scratch the surface of our story and begin to ask “why” our story becomes more complicated. This is often where writers get stuck. The more we hold onto our “idea” of our story, the more challenging it becomes to allow o

Hi Writers,
We carry our stories with us. They get passed from generation to generation. There are two parts to our stories: the facts, and the truth — and they have almost nothing to do with each other. Our stories often go like this: Nobody will love me if they know the truth. I am not allowed to ask for help. I am a fraud. I don’t matter.
I often tell writers that the purpose of story is to reveal a transformation. In other words, how do we reframe our “story” in order to

Check Out Writing Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Upgrade Your Story on BlogTalkRadio with Upgrade Your Story on BlogTalkRadio
“This was like a dream come true. I’ve been a fan of Alan Watt and his L.A. Writers Lab for years now, and having him on my show was an honor! He understands authors — the process, how hard it can be to finish our novels, what happens in our heads . . . he just gets it. The 90-Day Novel helps you embrace the struggle and move through it, rather than get

The 90-Day Screenplay is an intensive workshop designed to guide the screenwriter from initial idea, through first-draft, and finally to the completion of a polished screenplay. This workshop is available to screenwriters at all levels.

The first month is dedicated to stream-of-consciousness writing exercises as you begin to develop a relationship to the world of your screenplay. The instructor works one-on-one with writers each week to illustrate story principles. Throug

For all 90-Day Novel Tele-Course alumni, you can now repeat the workshop as often as you like with our lifetime prime member discounts. THE HEMINGWAY – $357 The standard 90-Day Novel workshop includes: 13 LIVE 90-MINUTE WORKSHOPS
every Monday from 12:00 to 1:30 pm. 13 LIVE 50-MINUTE Q&A’s
(Email your questions to Al. He goes over them LIVE at the end of each week and works one-on-one with writers as needed.) PLAYBACK ACCESS to the workshops for 7 days following each respective

Hi Writers,
I sat down yesterday with Allison Burnett, who happens to be one of the most interesting people I know. He is the author of the new novel, The Escape of Malcolm Poe, which comes out today from our publishing house, Writers Tribe Books. As usual, he had plenty to say.
10 Questions with Allison Burnett
1. Did you always want to be a writer?
No, when I was six, I wanted to be a stuntman. Then for a long time I wanted to be an actor. By the time I was a